Microsoft does not usually introduce new hardware at its developer conference. But this year the company at the Bild 2022 event from The Volterra project Discovered; A personal computer designed to help developers build native ARM applications with artificial intelligence capabilities.
Although not much information has been released about the Volterra project yet, we do know that this device from Snapdragon chipset Qualcomm with a Nervous processing unit or NPU Exclusive benefits. Microsoft says that this NPU is one of the best examples in the market in terms of capacity and productivity of artificial intelligence.
Neural processors are not common in personal computers. These processors are mostly used in smartphones rather than processing machine learning operations in Battery consumption To save. But with the supply of chips like M1 Apple With built-in NPUs, these processors are becoming increasingly common, and Microsoft wants to prepare for such a future.
“Since we expect neural processing units to be used in most, if not all, processors, we want to support NPUs on the platform,” said Panos Panay, Microsoft’s senior product manager. Windows “Let developers easily take advantage of these new capabilities.”
The Volterra project will be the start of the journey
Redmond residents are adding support for neural processors to Windows with the release of Volterra. The company also says development tools including Visual Studio 2022 And Windows Terminal They will soon be running natively on ARM hardware. All of this indicates that Microsoft is serious about encouraging developers to build native ARM applications for Windows.
According to information released by the company, Volterra seems to be a standard memory NVMe SSD And uses a fan for cooling. It also has three USB-A ports, a DisplayPort port, an Ethernet port and two USB-C ports. The body of the device is also from Recycled plastics Made of seas.
